Going Another Way
by Edward Carson
Summary: Elsie Carson encourages her husband to confront a more personal aspect of the new challenge in his life. SEASON 6 CHRISTMAS SPECIAL SPOILERS. The circumspect summary reflects a desire to give nothing away.


**Going Another Way**

They had walked home in silence after the conversation with His Lordship and Lady Mary. Elsie supposed she had seen it all unfolding as he had set it out for the Crawleys - his resignation, to take effect after the wedding; his careful screening of potential candidates, to ensure the family were properly taken care of; _their_ departure from the life of the family and even from the estate, so as not to encroach upon the new butler. And it didn't even really surprise her that it should all have come gushing out of him like that to the Crawleys when he'd not yet made the details explicit to her. Perhaps he hadn't really known what it had entailed until that very moment.

They exchanged only perfunctory remarks as they settled the cottage for the night and prepared for bed. He was drained, and no wonder. _I'm finished_ , he had told her weeks ago, when he had confessed his ailment to her. And he certainly looked finished. Defeated, anyway.

She sat by her dressing table, brushing out her hair, and watched him in the mirror as he climbed into bed and shifted onto his side. Looking away from her. So it had been for weeks.

At first she'd accepted his explanation that this change in habit, and interest, was the result of tiredness. They weren't young people, after all. But his age had not impeded him in the first months of their marriage, so she _had_ wondered. Since she had learned of his affliction, however, she'd assumed he was depressed and hoped it would pass. Perhaps it was time to have it out with him. She left off brushing her hair and joined him in the bed, sitting up beside him so she could look down on his profile, rather than snuggling up to his back.

"Charlie."

His head moved a little, acknowledging that he had heard her.

"You've not touched me in weeks. Almost months even. Is this why?"

He merely sighed and did not move.

"Are you going to deprive yourself of this, too, along with everything else that is dear to you?"

He was annoyed with her for bothering him about this, and shifted irritably. "I can't do it any more," he said coldly.

"Why not?" Elsie had a blunt streak about her. She'd never seen the use of equivocation.

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Well, not to me it isn't." But he'd set her to wondering. Had his depression had some physiological effect?

He glanced over his shoulder, saw her mind working, and growled in exasperation. "Not in _that_ way!"

His irascibility encouraged her. At least his manly pride hadn't deserted him. "Explain, please."

He heaved another sigh that gave the impression of bearing the weight of the world. "I don't know when it will happen, the tremors. They just _do_. I can't count on my arm to support me. And I don't want to hurt you. And then what if it spreads? It did in my grandfather. He had it in both hands. I just...can't count on myself anymore. I'm not able to...do...what I could even two, three months ago. That's finished, too."

She had never heard such bitterness in his voice and well he might be bitter, if what he said was the last word in it. But they were a long way from that, in her books at any rate. Silence prevailed for several minutes while she considered things and he wallowed in his woes.

At last she reached out and began to stroke his hip through the bedclothes. He tried to jerk away from her, but he was already well over on his side of the bed and there was nowhere to go.

"Do you know who you remind me of?" she asked, at length.

"No," he said crossly just beneath his breath but loud enough for her to hear, "but I'm unfortunately going to hear about it anyway."

"Me. Before we were married. My concerns about...well, you know."

His displeasure was apparent in the rigidity of his frame. "Raise another subject I had hoped to banish forever from my conscious mind."

She sighed. He really _was_ an old curmudgeon. "I'm only saying that I was feeling so terribly inadequate and didn't think it was possible that you would want me...as I was, am. And look how wrong I was about that." And she rapped lightly on his thigh. "Can you please turn around and look at me when we're having this conversation?" There was a testiness in her voice, too. He wasn't the only one who could be difficult.

He rolled over onto his back but stared determinedly away from her. He wasn't going to concede everything.

"It's not the same thing," he said, before she could start again. "Your problem was all in your head. It had no impact on the..the _reality_ of...our relationship. My infirmity is _physical_. I am _physically incapable_ of...of...doing it." Many months into their marriage and with the experience of many nights of intimacy behind them, he still could not speak directly of the subject.

Elsie was quite prepared to oblige him in this, as a lifetime's distance and discretion on the subject had left her, as much as him, without casual words for it. But she was distracted by his point. "I beg your pardon, Charlie," she said with some feeling, "but my apprehensions were not _all in my head_. The body of a sixty-year-old woman is quite a tangible thing and as fraught with challenges as that of a sixty-five year old man!" *****

He still wasn't looking at her. "First of all," he said formally, in a voice devoid of warmth, "you are perfect. And whatever the state of your body, or your apprehensions about your body anyway, it would not interfere with any _functions_. _My_ problem _does_."

She stared at him, at the expression of resistance set as in stone on his craggy countenance. "And this is why you've been denying yourself something which brings you so much pleasure." The revelation annoyed her. She should have gotten onto this much sooner.

"It is," he admitted. "And I can't see any way around it." He spoke with finality.

"I'm not surprised."

This elicited a response from him as nothing else had. His head whipped around and he scrambled up a bit in bed that he might look at her from a position of greater strength. "Leave me alone about this, Elsie! Leave me alone!"

His anger did not in the least put her off. Nothing about him put her off. "No," she said coolly. "Not when you're being so foolish."

He struggled to retain control of his feelings . "I won't stay here and listen to this," he said furiously, and began fumbling with the bedclothes, trying to pull them off so that he could escape.

But Elsie reached out and closed her hand firmly over his arm. "Yes, you will," she said quietly. "Charlie." It was an appeal.

Incensed by the hold she had on him - more of the heart than her light touch - he threw down the blanket and slumped back against the bedframe, but he looked away from her again. "Do you think I _want_ this?" he demanded, a hint of desperation in his voice. "Do you think I'm surrendering on this of my own _volition_?"

"No," she said mildly, and reached for his hands flexing anxiously in his lap. "No. Only I think you think there is only one way here, and if you can't do it that way then it can't be done."

"And I'm not right on this?" His voice was hard. He didn't mind facing the truth about things. Well, he believed he preferred to deal with the truth and learn to cope with it. But he didn't like false hope and resented her pretending there were options.

"Oh, Charlie. This is one area of life in which there are _infinite_ possibilities."

A look of dismay descended on his face and his eyes shifted to hers once more, filled with shock.

She conceded to the potential horrors her words had conjured up for him. "All right, perhaps not _infinite_ possibilities, but at least two or three. That I can think of. Maybe a few more, for someone with a greater imagination."

"How would _you_ know?" His impatience with this whole conversation was diverted by this bizarre - to his way of thinking - initiative by his wife. He was staring at her as though she was a stranger who had appeared in his bed. And this was clearly not a development that appealed to Charles Carson.

"Oh, don't get carried away," Elsie said, with some exasperation. And then she remembered why they were having this conversation at all and her demeanour softened. "All I'm saying, Charlie, is that you're a rule-follower. Your strength is in getting things right, _doing things properly_. I respect that about you, and admire you for it, and it's served you well all your life. But _I'm_ a problem-solver. Your goal is perfection to the ideal. Mine is to achieve what I can in the circumstances at hand. For me, if it doesn't work one way, then I'll try another. And _this_ is one of those situations in life where there _is no one right way_."

She gave him a minute to think about that. "Do you want this, Charlie?"

All the anger and aggravation and frustration of the evening - indeed, of the last few weeks - dissipated in him and he pulled one of his hands free so that he could place it over hers. "I do, Elsie." His voice was calm and quiet, and - Elsie recognized it from long acquaintance - loving.

"I think we can work this out so that you don't lose _this_ , too."

He held his arms out to her, then, and pulled her close for a gentle, lingering kiss. And then he held her against him for a long time. " _I_ think that I am the most fortunate of men, my love," he said softly, tightening his arms about her.

She snuggled against him, certain in the knowledge that a few challenges lay ahead of them, not least because actions _were_ more difficult than words - but more than relieved that she had helped her open-hearted husband to find his way again.

 ***** **NOTE:** According to _Downton Abbey: Rules for Household Staff_ , Carson was born in 1856, which would make him _sixty-nine_ in 1925. I have arbitrarily shifted his birthdate to 1860, so he is sixty-five.


End file.
